The Guardian Opens Up With New Developer API

The UK newspaper and website, the Guardian, has announced a new open API which will give third-party sites access to all the content the newspaper produces, both in print and online — over a million articles going back to 1999.

The Guardian’s new open approach comes on the heals of a similar move by the New York Times and seems to point toward a new kind of approach to online news — give away your content and send the advertising with it.

The idea behind the API is that the Guardian will be able to reach more readers without having to develop additional content. In the Guardian’s case the terms of use for the API mean that ads will come along with the content — more readers looking at more ads means more revenue.

It’s hardly a new idea — Google and countless others do very similar things with APIs — but the newspaper industry has been slow to accept that giving full access to content might be a viable business plan.

The actual API the Guardian has developed consist of two components — a Content API and what the Guardian calls the Data Store. The Content API offers a way to pull in the Guardian’s content — articles, some audio and video and more — for use on your own site.

The Data Store is a bit more interesting. As the name implies, the Data Store offers access to the Guardian’s data collections, which are put together by the paper’s editors. At the moment there are some 80 data "sets" covering everything from stats on world health spending, to data about the current worldwide recession to crime data for all of the U.K.

The Data Store is really a collection of Google Spreadsheets, which means developers can access it using the Spreadsheets Data API. The Data Store looks to be a fantastic resource for anyone who wants to develop mash-ups using large chunks of data, which are often very difficult to find.

One word of caution for would-be developers: Simon Willison, who help developed the new API, says that getting an API key may take a little extra time given the demand.

It’s too early to say whether or not giving away its content will help the Guardian in the long run, but those of us rooting for the newspaper industry, it’s a welcome change to see a newspaper that wants to embrace the open web rather than hide from it.